If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Drive geometry Problem

I had a Dell Poweredge 4600 which was running RIAD-5 on three 36GB SCSI harddisk drives with a PERC 2C SCSI RAID controller card.
I wanted to mirror the volume using some software utility. Although many claims that you cant create a mirror image of an raid-5 array I was able to create images with R-Drive Image 4.0 without a problem. I even restored the image to a SATA 80GB harddisk drive and accessed the contents. I only took the images of the two main partitions. There was another small partition with all the dell system utilities which I didn’t care about…

Now when I tried to boot from the SATA harddisk on a deferent computer, the system hangs at the message “Verifying DMI pool data….”. I know even a perfectly created mirror image wont work straight off on a deferent computer, but I cannot even get to the “Inaccessible boot device” screen.

When I check the drive with Partition magic it reports “"Disk 2 appears to have partitions created using a different drive geometry (1h 1s).....” and displays the drive as BAD.
I don’t know this happens because of a problem that occurred at the image creation process or is it simply a problem with the partitions? or is it because I didnt copied the dell system utilities partition?

Any ideas how to solve this problem?

P.S: Now I don’t have access to the original poweredge. I only have the mirrored images.

Well after a lot of attempts I got it to boot up. I recreated a utility partition at the beginning of the drive. The article here helped me a lot. But I didn’t add any files to that partition it was just an empty FAT16 partition with type set to DE.
Restored the other partitions, disabled the PERC drivers and now Im able to logon normally.